Bringing Up Father — buf411228f

George McManus's Bringing Up Father ran continuously from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in syndication history. This Sunday page sends Jiggs and Maggie aboard a yacht whose stabilizer and compass, working separately but not together, steer the vessel aground into a lighthouse — chickens, pigs, and ducks scattering on impact. McManus draws in bold, clean outlines with Art Nouveau flourishes in his figures and lettering, the panel borders themselves alive with energy. The strip's episodic gag structure — setup, complication, comic disaster — is the foundational grammar of the Sunday page format that directly fed the first comic book reprints of the 1930s, establishing sequential panels and speech balloons as the medium's native language.